


To Breathe Your Breath

by sakuuya



Category: Battle for London in the Air (Roleplay)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Vampire, Baby's first murder, Blood Drinking, F/M, That one scene from Twilight, Vampire Turning, YOU IN DANGER GIRL, the vibe I'm going for here is "early 2000s FFN"
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-07
Updated: 2020-11-16
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:07:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27440914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sakuuya/pseuds/sakuuya
Summary: Celine has a theory about why Dr. Jhandir is so weird, and decides to go to his house in the middle of the night to confront him about it.
Relationships: Dr. Anil Jhandir & Celine Abinall
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	1. Into This Night I Wander

The night was misty and windy—appropriately so, Celine thought—with a gibbous moon just peeking through the clouds. A chill would have been better, but summer was just starting and the dark air was temperate even this long after moonrise. Whenever the wind sent a piece of litter skittering through the gutter, it sounded like some creature of the night creeping up to attack her.

Cordelia would probably tell her that she was being fanciful, and that she should perhaps be concerned instead with muggers, a more realistic threat here on Ω. Celine shook off the thought, though. She had a derringer tucked into her purse if she needed it, but it was more fun to think about imagined dangers than prosaic ones. And besides, tonight was not a night to consider what her sister would think of her behavior. If she got too far down _that_ avenue of thought, she’d lose her nerve before she even made it to Dr. Jhandir’s house.

She persevered all through the winding, streetlight-free darkness of Ω. Dr. Jhandir opened his office door as soon as she knocked. He must have been waiting for her, although Celine didn’t think she was late. He looked perfectly fresh and put together, neither like he’d been waiting up half the night for this meeting nor like he’d been recently roused from slumber. Even with everything Celine suspected about him, it was a bit of a surprise when she herself felt bushed, propelled forward only by excitement, nerves, and strong tea.

“Good evening, Celine.” There were no lights on in the office. Celine knew the duplex’s wiring was faulty—the doctor complained about it often enough—but had he really been waiting here in the dark? Somehow, that was eerier than the whole lonely walk had been.

“Evening! Thanks for meeting me so late.”

“It’s quite improper, to visit a man’s house alone after dark. But you said you had something important, for my ears only? Some rebellion business that you couldn’t say in a letter?”

“Something like that,” Celine half-agreed. “Can we talk in your parlor?”

“Of course. I don’t mean to be ungracious. Please, follow me.” Dr. Jhandir seemed to have no trouble navigating the office and stairs in the dark; Celine stumbled after him as best she could. There were no lights on upstairs either, but the moonlight seemed brighter, filtered through the big bay window, and reflecting off the petals of the flowers in their pots around the room.

It took Celine a moment to realize what was odd about that scene, but once it clicked, she ran over to the nearest blossom and gently ran a finger over its petals. They were real.

“Oh, they’re gorgeous! How do you get them to bloom at night?” 

“Nothing more exciting than selective breeding, I’m afraid. But I enjoy having the company when I’m keeping late hours.”

“That’s sort of what I wanted to speak about, actually,” Celine said, jumping on the best segue she was likely to find. She approached Dr. Jhandir, but he backed away, matching her step for step.

“I’m not at home to any further impropriety, Celine,” he warned as the backs of his legs hit an end table, jostling the night-blooming flowers it held. “Requesting a meeting at this hour is within the scope of rebellion business, but if you have any fleshly motives, I strongly suggest you leave at once.”

Celine stopped where she stood and burst out laughing. “Land sakes, Doctor! I promise, your virtue is safe with me.” She sat down in the nearest chair, well away from him, to show that she meant no harm. “In all seriousness, I apologize if I misled you about my intentions. I know I can come off as forward, but I didn’t come here with any carnal purpose in mind. Nor, to be honest, do I have any urgent rebel business.”

“Then why are you here?” Dr. Jhandir’s eyes glowed like flower petals in the weak moonlight. He sat, but rigidly. Her reassurances hadn’t relaxed him an inch. Still, Celine screwed her courage to the sticking place, as Cordelia was so fond of saying _(oh God, Cordelia)_ and pressed on.

“I know what you are.” The words galloped out of her mouth like the Headless Horseman was chasing them. 

“I don’t know what you mean.” 

The doctor was as still as the grave; in the darkness of the parlor, Celine couldn’t even be sure that his lips had moved. It was dawning on her that this whole excursion had perhaps been ill-advised. But she was here, and she’d never been one to back down once she’d set something in motion.

She tried for a more measured tone as she explained, “I’ve been watching you—not like that. Damn, how to explain this? I’ve never seen you eat or drink anything, even when other people are—” 

“Public eating is vulgar, and more people should abstain from it.”

“You don’t go out in the day if you can help it—”

“Because I’m _in hiding_ , Celine. I’d be hanged—or worse—if someone from the government were to spot me living here.”

“Would you just let me finish, please? Darn, it’s hard to keep my thoughts in order when you keep interrupting.” She did wait for a response then, but Dr. Jhandir just stared at her with his fixed, slightly luminous gaze. “When you think nobody can see you, you’re too fast, too strong, but you go back to normal when someone’s paying attention. And you smile with your lips closed so no one can see your teeth.”

“So you’re saying, what, that I’m eccentric? As a visitor to England yourself, you must be aware that customs aren’t the same the world over. And India has a long, rich history prior to British rule. It should have occurred to you that—”

“Everyone in India is a vampire?”

The naked shock on Dr. Jhandir’s face transmuted to anger, and Celine half-expected him to snarl at her, to bare his fangs. But his scowl was tight-lipped.

“What are you even talking about?”

“You don’t have to pretend with me! I know you’ve been careful—I bet that, if anyone else bothered to watch you like I have, they _would_ just think you’re an eccentric foreigner. But me, I’ve studied monsters and folklore and the like ever since I was a girl.”

“And has it ever occurred to you that your girlhood fantasies may be coloring your perception? You’re misinterpreting perfectly normal behavior because you want your theory to be true. You’re not a girl anymore, Celine. Vampires aren’t real.”

“Then open your mouth.”

“ _Excuse me?_ ”

“Show me your teeth.” Celine rose from her chair and approached the doctor again. “If you have normal human teeth, then I’ll write this whole thing off as a product of an overheated imagination.

She reached him, reached out a hand, only for one his to whip up, snakelike, and grab her around the wrist. She’d barely seen him move. Dr. Jhandir wasn’t a tall man, but he was taller than Celine, and he positively loomed as he stood, forcing her backward without any apparent effort.

“You need to mind your own business, Ms. Abinall,” Dr. Jhandir said, surprisingly calm. But the curl of his lip revealed the tip of a too-sharp incisor. Celine let out a mad little giggle, half-triumphant and half-terrified. “Ah, is something amusing? Do you see something humorous”

“Like I told you, you don’t have to hide from me.” Celine’s voice sounded unsteady, even to her own ears. When she had imagined this conversation in her mind, ever since she first noticed the doctor’s strange little quirks, somehow she had never considered that it might play out like this. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

That surprised a laugh out of Dr. Jhandir, an open-mouthed one that let his fangs catch the light. “I don’t think that’s what you should be worried about right now, Celine.”


	2. The Path I Fear to Tread

Celine shut her eyes and bit her lip, waiting for the sting of those fangs in her neck. It never came. Instead, Dr. Jhandir shoved her down onto a chaise longue and resumed his own seat. He sat like he always did, prim and straight-backed. If not for his long incisors, still on display, this could have been one of any number of conversations they’d had since Celine’s arrival in LITA.

“Look at me, Celine.” She did, trying to meet his level, luminous stare with a brave face, though she suspected that he could see the way her heart was jackrabbiting in her chest. “Who knows that you came to call on me tonight?”

“No one,” Celine answered automatically. It was the truth; the thought that she maybe should have lied occurred to her only distantly. “Look, my intention tonight wasn’t to get eaten, but it also wasn’t to threaten you in any way, all right?”

“I find it difficult to believe that all you wanted to do was tell me what you had figured out. Why are you here?”

Celine reached over to an end table and turned on a gas lamp. The ethereal glow of the flowers was still beautiful, but she needed warmer, more humane light right now. She considered using the movement as a way to start running, to maybe buy herself a couple of precious seconds to make a getaway. But there was no catching Dr. Jhandir off-guard—he was watching her movements like a cat would watch a mouse. Even in the lamplight, his eyes glowed now that he had given up his pretense of humanity. Celine cast a regretful look at the parlor door before settling back onto the chaise longue. 

“ _Why did you come here, Celine?_ ” Dr. Jhandir demanded. Honestly, Celine had forgotten he was waiting for an answer.

“I want you to make me a vampire.”

“Absolutely not,” he said, just like that. Celine felt heat creep up into her cheeks at the summary dismissal, and she pressed her lips into a thin line. She had thought they were friends—surely her request merited a little more consideration.

With that annoyance coursing through her, she said, “If you don’t, I’ll—” before common sense caught up to her.

“Spread the word that I’m a vampire?” the doctor sneered. “Round up a mob with torches and pitchforks? Don’t be melodramatic. It’s 1893. The idea that vampires live among us has no place in modern London.”

“Cordelia would believe me,” Celine said quietly, determined not to look away. She meant to leave it at that, but Dr. Jhandir laughed, and she couldn’t stop herself from continuing: “She would! When she was younger, she dated—was engaged to, actually—someone like you. She just barely escaped, but since then… I don’t know how many other vampires she’s killed. At least three.”

Dr. Jhandir was abruptly at her side again, standing over Celine with his soft-looking, doctorly hands curled like claws, not yet bending town to hurt her but letting the possibility loom along with him.

“Does she know you came here tonight?”

“N-no! I told you, I came because I want you to change me, not because I want anything to happen to you.” In retrospect, it might have been a good idea, but it was far too late for that now. She never did have a talent for foresight, so she might as well go for candor. “I’ve been distancing myself from her because I don’t want her to find out when—if—I go through with it. Why, if you killed me now, she might not notice for weeks. I shouldn’t have tried to threaten you. I’m sorry.”

Dr. Jhandir looked for a moment like he was going to snarl out more mockery of her foolhardiness, but his tight expression bloomed into something like wonder.

“You really want this, don’t you? Why? With your sister’s… predilections, why would you put yourself in this position?”

His questions were still probing, but they lacked the sharp, derisive edge of his earlier inquiries. Celine tried to fight down her residual shock and frustration that Dr. Jhandir hadn’t even considered her request. This was progress.

“Cordelia lied to me for _years_ about what happened between her and Thaddeus.” Something dangerous flashed in Dr. Jhandir’s eyes, but he didn’t say anything, so she continued. “I had to piece it all together myself, and once I did… how could I want to be her, in that situation, if there was a chance I could be him? All that research, it lit a fire in me. 

“And I admit that you had a lot to do with it.You know I’m interested in a whole mess of things besides vampires, and you’ve done so much. I never thought I’d meet a living person with the kind of experience you have. Oh, but I guess I still haven’t, have I?” She gave a little laugh, as much from nerves as from her joke. “From all Cordelia has told me, Thaddeus was a ratbag, and other vampires tend to be obvious about their condition. You’re on a whole other level, and once I put the pieces together, I thought you might be willing to help me.”

“Vampirism isn’t just something you can try on a lark. You’re a smart young lady, but I don’t believe you’ve thought this through.” The rejection stung, but Celine couldn’t help but notice that there was no condescension in the doctor’s voice now, only concern. She dug her nails into the palms of her hands. Dr. Jhandir’s gaze shifted almost imperceptibly at the movement, but he otherwise didn’t move, still standing over her like a gargoyle.

“I have! Like I said, I’ve been distancing myself from Cordelia—from everybody, really—so she wouldn’t get suspicious at a sudden change, and I’ve been slowly shifting my schedule to be more nocturnal, so there won’t be any big differences there, either. I don’t want to live a typical, boring life, Doctor, and I don’t want to be prey. Surely you can understand that!”

“Have you ever killed anyone?”

“No?”

“If I changed you, how could you guarantee that you wouldn’t starve yourself to death from a crisis of conscience, or at least to the point where you couldn’t control yourself? And then your sister, of all people, would kill the both of us.”

“I’ve thought about it a lot,” Celine argued. She didn’t actually know how old the doctor was, come to think of it, but damned if she was going to let him treat her like a child regardless. “And I’ve read about it, and you make it sound wonderful. And I, I’ve come this far. I’m sure I could handle killing somebody.”

“Prove it. Go out and murder someone, and bring me proof. If you can do that, I’ll consider changing you.”  
  
“Really?!” Celine burst out, her consternation forgotten at this glimmer of hope. Dr. Jhandir just nodded, seemingly unprepared for her enthusiasm. “Oh, thank you! I—do you want me to bring you blood?”

“Thank you, but I’m perfectly capable of procuring my own food,” he said with the tight-lipped smile he used when he was pretending to be human. “Any proof will be fine, so long as it’s definitive. And Celine, if this was a ploy to let your sister kill me, or if I find out that you’ve revealed anything of what we spoke of tonight, to anyone, I _will_ kill you. Do I make myself clear?”

“Absolutely! Oh, thank you!” Celine had half a mind to hug him, but resisted. She certainly knew him well enough to know that an embrace wouldn’t help her chances. “I’ll get to planning right away!”

“See that you do. I won’t wait forever.” 

Dr. Jhandir stepped back to let her jump up off the chaise longue, but he didn’t offer her a hand to shake, or an arm to help her down the stairs to his dark office.

“Good night, Celine.”

“Good night, Doctor! I won’t let you down, I promise!”

Celine may not have been a creature of the night _(yet!_ she thought) but nevertheless, she practically flew home.


	3. Into the Sea of Waking Dreams

The morning dawned bright and clear, a beautiful early-summer day. Although Celine had stayed up half the night, she sprang out of bed as soon as the sun peeked through her bedroom window. Her meeting with Dr. Jhandir seemed almost like a dream. She had been _right_ about him, and moreover, she’d practically gotten him to agree to her request. All she had to do was commit one single murder.

If Celine had harbored any reservations about killing, she wouldn’t have approached Dr. Jhandir about what she knew in the first place. To survive as a vampire, you had to drink mortal blood. That was simply the fact of the matter. She wasn’t squeamish; she was _excited_.

But she didn’t know how to go about it. Deep down in her most secret heart, she had long hoped that Dr. Jhandir, the most knowledgeable person she’d ever met, would be there to guide her for her first time. She couldn’t ask him, though—she had to prove to him that she was worthy to change, which meant standing on her own two feet.

It only took her until that afternoon to decide that trying to meticulously plan a murder was, when she got right down to it, merely a stalling tactic. Celine knew she was smart, but all she had to go on was, what? Novels, which were fictional and often nakedly absurd, and the confessions of real-life murders, who, by definition, had gotten caught and thus were of no use to her. 

So she went out that evening, as the shadows lengthened and the streetlights buzzed to life like a cloak of flies. She had a gun and a knife in her purse, because she didn’t know, ultimately, which would prove more useful, along with a scarf to stop them clinking and giving away her intent.

Celine hurried through the darkening streets. She didn’t have a firm plan in mind, but she knew that in order to have any chance at success, she’d have to be in control of the situation. If she were accosted by some mugger, she’d probably be the one killed—and wouldn’t that be a kick in the teeth!

Luck was with her that night, and she made it to her destination without being accosted by anything worse that some chilly evening rain. It was a run-down pub that she must have passed dozens of times but had never felt the need to go into. The whole thing was just… prosaic, like something one might see on the front of a picture postcard depicting working-class life in London. That impression didn’t change once she made it inside, where the air was heavy with smoke and the scent of old beer. Several men at the bar turned to look at her when she entered; Celine smiled back as she removed her mantlet. Internally, she was imagining how each of them might look as they gasped out their last breaths.

The dress she wore was black, of course. She hadn’t had time to order a new one for this adventure. But it did show off more of her chest and shoulders than she’d ordinarily be interested in displaying. The men at the bar seemed to understand the message Celine was sending, staring at her as she sashayed deeper into the pub. There were also a number of women at the bar, often standing, and mostly dressed like she was. 

She sat near the deep end of the bar and ordered a gin. She liked beer better, but she was here to play a role, not to enjoy a night out on the town. Her enjoyment would come later, she hoped.

Over the course of the evening, three men approached her to engage in deceptively light chatter. Each time, she demurred when the man made an overt proposition. By the time she recognized her response as hesitance—as cowardice—it was too late at night for her to make any headway in convincing a man to “go home” with her.

She walked home with her pistol clutched in her hand, mentally daring some night-time ruffian to try and take advantage of her. Shooting a mugger to death would at least ameliorate her shame at being unwilling to lure a man from the pub to murder, even as she recognized it as unacceptably dangerous. But alas, no one was interested in attacking her.

The following night, Celine tried again. She wanted to be as anonymous as possible, so she picked a different pub to haunt. At least London had no shortage of those. This one was less smokey, its clientele quieter, and she looked more out of place in her skin-baring dress. Nevertheless, she hadn’t even finished her first gin when she felt a tap on her shoulder.

Celine turned with a big salacious grin on her face, which seemed to fluster the bald man behind her. She was barely even faking it—as she looked him up and down, she saw that he neither wore a ring nor dressed like he had anyone at home who looked after his appearance. He was much taller than her, perhaps even taller than Cordelia, but slight enough that Celine thought she would probably be able to take him out, as long as she had the element of surprise. And if he noticed that her smile was predatory, well, perhaps that was just part of the transaction.

“Is there something you wanted, darling?” she purred, trying not to giggle at the absurdity, or at the effervescent feeling bubbling up in her chest.

“It’s a lovely night, isn’t it?” the man asked. He sounded calm enough, but Celine could see anxious sweat glinting on his head even in the dim light of the bar.

She had no interest in dragging this out. Every minute she spent trying to keep up her charade was another minute when she might get cold feet. “Beautiful,” she agreed. “Fancy a walk?”

The man smiled and offered his arm, which she took with a sly smile of her own, leaning in close to him as they sauntered back out of the pub. Celine has always enjoyed having the power to turn a man’s head, despite her lack of interest in men themselves. She had just never expected it to come in this handy.

Once they were swallowed up by the night outside, away from the safe glow of the pub, their conversation quickly pivoted to business. Celine had no idea whether the prices she quoted were reasonable, but the man seemed to be amenable to them.

He was just as amenable when Celine tugged him, laughing, into an unlit alley, and his gut was amenable to Celine’s knife. She pulled it out, expecting him to fall, but he staggered back, wide-eyed and clutching at the wound, then turned and fled.

“Oh, dammit!”

Celine chased him down the alley. His wound was obviously slowing him down, thank goodness, or else she wouldn’t have a chance in hell of catching up. As it was, he was still quick enough that she had to dive at him as he started to turn a corner into another dark, narrow little street. Her knife went into his side, he yelled, and they both tumbled to the ground with her on top of him. Perhaps to an onlooker, it really would look like a tryst.

She put her free hand over the man’s mouth to stop him from making any more noise as she stabbed into his chest. The knife barely went in, stopped by his ribs. As she pulled it out to try again, he bit her palm.

At least she hissed rather than screamed, maintaining _some_ amount of quiet and composure in what was turning out to be, frankly, an embarrassing mess of an encounter. She reached up and tried to slit his throat, but this time the blade went in a bit too far and got stuck in the muscle of his neck. His weak spasms beneath her, combined with all the blood everywhere, made it hard for her hand to find purchase on the knife to pull it free and try again. It was still lodged in there when she realized that he’d stopped fighting her, stopped breathing into her hand.

She cautiously sat back, bringing her bite-marked hand away from his mouth. No response. She’d done it!

The process had been more farcical than she envisioned, but the result was more beautiful than she could ever have imagined. Celine covered her mouth with her hands to stop her from laughing or shrieking or sobbing at the sight of the man’s broken, sprawled form. No single sound could have done justice to the fierce joy pounding through her chest, so strong that she felt her own ribcage might crack open.

She could have stayed here for hours just drinking in the beauty of the murder, but the man _had_ managed to yell before she took him down. Someone could have heard it—for all she knew, the cops could be on their way right now. She needed to get her souvenir and get out.

When she was speculating on how her first kill might go, Celine had thought that it would be poetic to bring her victim’s heart back to Dr. Jhandir. But her abortive attempt to stab there meant that, realistically, she had zero chance of getting it out with any alacrity. And it hadn’t even occurred to her to bring a camera along.

Once Celine freed her knife, she ended up prizing out the dead man’s eyes—one of the few body parts she could remove without having to cut through any bone. She wrapped them in her scarf for safekeeping, then stood to take what stock of herself she could in the darkness of the alley. Her dress, gloves, and mantlet were black, so they wouldn’t show the stains. She gave her face a quick wipe with the scarf (careful not to crush the eyes inside) and flipped the black veil down from her hat. With no mirror to see herself in, that would have to do.

She was about to sneak out of the alley when another thought occurred to her. So she knelt next to the dead man and leaned in to delicately lap up a little of the blood on his neck. It didn’t taste any different than her own blood did when she, say, stuck her finger in her mouth after getting a papercut. Still, her eyes fluttered shut at the intoxicating portent that coppery taste represented.


	4. Nothing Stands Between Us Now

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cover image by [DelusionsbyBonnie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DelusionsbyBonnie/pseuds/DelusionsbyBonnie)!

It was nearly two in the morning when Celine emerged from the alley, bloody and grinning behind her veil. She headed toward Ω, toward Dr. Jhandir’s house. It was late, but where else could she go? She doubted that the eyeballs in her purse would keep. Besides, it wasn’t like she was going to have to rouse the doctor.

Celine was right about that last part, at least. Dr. Jhandir opened his office door as soon as she knocked. Had he been waiting for her?

He didn’t sound particularly excited when he greeted her, though he certainly didn’t sound like she had woken him up, either, and he was dressed as immaculately as the last time she had seen him. For her part, Celine was aware that she looked a shambles, with drying blood crusting her clothes. Dr. Jhandir didn’t seem to mind as he waved her inside and led her up to his parlor. He had kindly gone to the trouble of turning on his damn lights tonight, but the night-blooming flowers around the room seemed to glow even brighter in the gaslight.

Celine stayed standing, cognizant of what a mess she was. She suspected that ruining Dr. Jhandir’s furniture might be a dealbreaker.

“I assume you killed someone, then?” Dr. Jhandir was doing a good job sounding professional and dispassionate, but his lambent eyes gave him away. They swept up and down Celine’s bloodstained form with a rapaciousness she had never seen in him before. 

“I did!” she replied. Then, fearing that she sounded too eager, she added, “I have proof, if you’d like to see it.”

“Of course.”

Celine pulled the scarf out of her purse and unwrapped it. She liked to imagine that the eyes inside still bore traces of the fear and pain their owner had felt in the last moments of his life,

“You really did,” Dr. Jhandir said, in the same fascinated tone he’d used when he first realized she was serious about all this. “Tell me what happened.”

So Celine relayed her story, leaving out some of the more embarrassing bits. She had been willing, and she’d pulled it off. Dr. Jhandir didn’t need to know every little mistake she had made along the way.

“Good,” he said when she’d finished. “And would you be willing to do it again?”

“I’m going to do it again,” Celine promised, surprising even herself. She hadn’t given the matter any thought, beyond the necessity of killing to sustain a vampiric existence. “Even if you never change me, I… This man’s death was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I need to see it again, even if I never get to be a vampire.”

Apparently, that was the right answer: “What a perfect creature you are, Celine. All right. You’ve proven yourself. Stay here while I prepare.”

Dr. Jhandir swept out of the room, leaving Celine to wonder what exactly he meant. She imagined him setting up some kind of baroque ceremony with candles and incense and esoteric runes carved into the floor. But when Dr. Jhandir returned a few minutes later, he had only changed clothes. And not into occult robes, either—he was dressed for surgery, lacking only a mask.

“Should I change too?” Celine asked. Even covered in blood, she felt overdressed.

“Yes, that’s probably wise. I doubt there’s any saving that dress as-is, but at least you won’t leave blood stains on my furniture. A moment.” He disappeared into the other room again and emerged a moment later with what looked like another surgical gown.

Celine took it from him and went into the washroom to change. She stripped out of her bloody clothes but left her corset and combination on, although the surgical gown completely covered her up. In fact, it was too long, probably the doctor’s size. Dr. Jhandir looked clinical in his, but the long white cotton gown made Celine feel like she was going to be baptized—which was accurate, in a way. 

When she emerged from the washroom, Dr. Jhandir was standing exactly where he’d been when he handed her the gown, as though he could think of nothing to do except wait for her.

“You have one last chance to back out,” the doctor said as he approached her. “Are you sure this is what you want?”

“One hundred percent sure.”

Dr. Jhandir nodded and sat her down on a sofa without another word. Celine wanted to ask if he wasn’t worried about blood stains anymore, but she knew it’d ruin the moment. So she just let him tilt her chin up and to the side with a gloved hand, baring her neck to him. He bent down as if to kiss her. There wasn’t even a ghost of breath on her throat, no human warmth in his hand, but she could feel his glowing eyes admiring her.

He didn’t give her any warning before he bit down. Celine gasped in pain, but the sting was quickly replaced by a strange, tingling warmth spreading through her body. The only thing she could think to compare the sensation to was the way it felt to kill a man.

Celine must have passed out, because the next thing she knew, she was lying in an unfamiliar bed. She took a deep breath and realized abruptly that before that, she hadn’t been breathing at all. The enormity of what had happened hit her all at once, and she levered herself into a sitting position to take further stock. She was prodding at her newly-grown fangs when Dr. Jhandir came in, dressed like this was any other day.

“Ah! Good morning, Celine—or good evening, I should say. You were dead for nearly 48 hours; I was worried you wouldn’t make it back. How are you feeling?”

 _Great_ , she tried to say, but the word got stuck in her dry throat. Instead, she coughed.

“Yes, that’s about what I expected. Here.” Dr. Jhandir came over to the bed and helped Celine up. She felt stiff and sluggish, nothing like she had assumed vampirism would be. He took her hand (his didn’t feel so cold any more) and led her, barefoot and still in her too-long surgical gown, back down to his office and through the door into the other half of the duplex.

This side of the building was dusty and detritus-strewn, but it wasn’t entirely vacant. There was some very interesting-looking equipment up against the walls. Celine would ordinarily have been keen to investigate (was that a rack in the corner?) but tonight her eyes were drawn inexorably toward a tall wooden chair in which a woman was restrained and gagged. The woman looked exhausted, but she started struggling when the door opened. To Celine, she looked like a mouse wriggling under the paw of a cat. The terror rolling off her was intoxicating, and Celine swore she could hear the woman’s heart pounding.

Celine looked beseechingly up at the doctor, who nodded. “You need to eat.”

She sure did. The dryness in her throat had been building to an unbearable degree since she laid eyes on the restrained woman, and she practically pounced now, latching onto the side of the woman’s neck, where the thrum of blood was the strongest.

It was not, perhaps, the most dignified meal she’d ever had. The rhythm of biting and sucking took some getting used to. But each mouthful of hot blood was glorious. Celine could feel her stiffness melt away as that warmth suffused her body.

By the time she felt like herself again, her prey was limp in the restraints—not dead, but close. For the first time since she’d started feeding, she looked over at Dr. Jhandir, who was standing by the door with the same avaricious look on his face he’d had just before changing her.

“D’you… want some?” Celine asked, awkwardness jabbing through her joy. Oh no, what if her first act as a vampire was to presume on Dr. Jhandir’s hospitality?

He smirked, showing fang. “No, I ate two days ago.”

“Oh. Right. Then…?”

“I was simply admiring you. You’re exquisite, you know.”

Celine was, in fact, a bit of a mess, the front of her gown thick with drying blood. She _felt_ exquisite, though, more alive than she’d ever been when she had only her own blood coursing through her. Giddy with that feeling, she winked at him before turning back to her meal. She could feel when the woman finally died, and that blood was the sweetest of all, so delicious she could hardly bear to swallow.

Dr. Jhandir must have noticed, because he was suddenly beside her, his stare more intense than ever.

“How do you feel?” he asked, hungry and urgent.

“Perfect. _Exquisite_ ,” Celine answered dreamily. “That was…” she struggled for a description through her haze of pleasure.

“There’s nothing quite like it,” the doctor agreed, smiling with his teeth. “You’ll get better at handling the aftermath, but it never stops being incredible.” He put an arm around her, and only then did Celine realize how unsteady she’d become. She leaned into him.

“Thank you,” she mumbled. For holding her up, she meant, but it could have been for any number of things.

“And you. I’ve been alone for a very long time.”

“Well, not any more,” Celine promised. Dr. Jhandir shifted beside her, and she could have sworn that he was not just supporting but embracing her.


End file.
